Tuesday 8 September 2009

100 Best Classical Recordings

No matter how I think choosing any "top few" in art is a folly, and giving "classical rules" conceited, it's nice to see a Hvorostovsky recording among the opera's top ten in the 100 best classical recordings, according to Igor Toronyi-Lalic, John Allison, and Michael Kennedy:


"7 Tchaikovsky Eugene Onegin (conductor Semyon Bychkov) Philips £17.60, RRP £17.99
Russia’s greatest opera, amid strong competition, Tchaikovsky’s 'lyric scenes’ have not been better served on disc than by the idiomatic conducting of Semyon Bychkov and a cast including Dmitri Hvorostovsky’s fresh-voiced Onegin."

It's only a pity that the discussion is not open under that article; I would give the authors a piece of my mind for telling me what to like and what to throw away.

2 comments:

  1. I vehemently concur with you, frufruJ! Critics today have simply lost contact with reality! Cannot they realize passion and beauty of the highest plane, they pander to what is commercially acclaimed and not what is of the soul and Classic for the test of time.

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  2. Actually, these critics seem to be know-it-alls who tell me to throw away everything commercially acclaimed and listen solely to what is not so well known, that is, what *they* consider good. Picking ten recordings in every classical genre, out of the huge sum, is pointless, because it's purely the author's opinion spiced with oh so many factors. However, if you pose as an authority and tell the others what to listen to - what to like - as the authors did in the second part of the article, you're missing the *very essence* of art. Even though I do agree on some points, on others I strongly disagree. That is why I'm so annoyed by that article. Critics with this attitude should disappear from the Earth's surface.

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